Challenge Overview
NASA needs to integrate the ION Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) implementation of Bundle Protocol (BP) with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server to support the transfer of astronaut email to/from the International Space Station (ISS).
Microsoft Exchange Server currently supports RPC over HTTP(s) protocol (a.k.a. Outlook Anywhere - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc243950.aspx). TopCoder will assemble an HTTP(s) proxy that will use DTN to transport the data to earth.
The image bellow shows the architecture. The application is divided into 2 modules: space_ssl_proxy and ground_dtn_proxy. The space proxy receives connections from the outlook client and sends to the ground proxy using Delay Tolerant Payload Conditioning (DTPC) Protocol over Bundle Protocol. The ground proxy receives the bundles and establish a channel with Exchange Server.
There is a system architecture attached to this challenge, but we had to make a slight change. Insted of using lighthttpd proxy, we are using a self developed proxy.
All functions of Outlook Client should work with the proxy, however, the focus of the test is not a regression test of Microsoft Outlook. We need to focus on communication with the proxy. Just a basic set of outlook functionalities will be used to validate communication with the proxy. See the example scenarios listed in the Requirements section bellow.
Final Submission Guidelines
Requirements
The goal of this competition is to develop a quality assurance plan and test scenarios to ensure that the requirements are met and the application works correctly. The plan and scenarios should test the application requirements for both positive and negative cases. A delay test for retransmission can be designed using ION utility called owltsim (packaged with ION source code). Tests will not be automated.
Your tests should include, but not be limited to these:
- Sending email (with and without attachments)
- Large emails**
- Moving emails into folders
- Creating a calender item
- Creating a task
- Space proxy down
- Ground proxy down
- Exchange server unreachable
- Delayed tests: delayed segments and lost segments using owltsim.
**: Microsoft outlook RPC protocol sustains an open connection by setting a large content-length in the HTTP header. It would be a nice test to force reaching this limit. Usually, it is 2GB. So, basically, sending multiple large attachments in several different emails until it reaches this maximum.
Submission deliverables
- A QA Plan written in a Microsoft Word compatible document.
- A Microsoft Excel compatible spreadsheet with the detailed Test Scenarios.
Documentation Provided
See download section at the right to download the following documents:
- The architecture specification
- The latest assembly delivery (fully funtional proxy, but DTN is not yet integrated)
- A sample test scenario submission from previous ION-DTN LTP authentication contest to be used as a reference
Technology Overview
- Linux (Redhat or Ubuntu)
- C
- ION-DTN 3.2.0: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/
- HTTP 1.0/1.1
- Microsoft Outlook 2010
- Exchange Server 2010
- Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC over HTTP)